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Official Zenith AMA 2
Today, October 25, 2019, a few of the developers of Zenith (Andy, Lauren, William, and Jessica) got together to host a Discord AMA. Here are the results of said AMA! Question: As you know, alot of people who play VR have bare minimum specs required to run most games, this causes quite a drop in performance and can lead to pretty severe motion sickness. There are a few games that offer certain settings, like an FOV slider or other sollution. Do you have any plans to implement a way to lower or raise graphics? This way people can tune what they need for the game, and if so do you have any intent to add someway to combat motion sickness? Answer: That's a good question, because we're also launching on the Quest, you can be sure we'll have an extremely performant build that will run great on any PC, so the baseline version should run really smoothly. Plus we will also have a variety of locomotion systems that will eliminate simulator sickness. Question: Billboards, can we change the image on them at any point in time? Or is the same one going to stay on the billboards? Answer: No plans on changing them for now, we have a lot to get to already Question: Can you give us more information about the guild system? Answer: The guild system is still a WIP, but you can expect something similar to what you've seen in other MMOs, nothing too radically different. Question: What is going to be added to help prevent VR vs PC players "advantage" in battles, especially PVP (if being added). Answer: The VR and PC versions will be significantly different both in terms of interface as well as abilities, so the balancing is mostly about asymmetric gameplay balancing and not 1:1 balancing if that makes sense, since the classes will be different Question: What kind of environment do you really want to add to the game, beyond the city of Zenith? Answer: Besides the vast city of Zenith, there will be a large overworld section of the game akin to more open world gameplay. In this area you will be able to explore the remnants of past civilizations and fight corrupted enemies! Question: From a technical standpoint, how do you plan on even making this MMO possible on the oculus quest without downgrading the scale of the game on the PC VR? Answer: We're using level of details (LODs) and we can downscale textures from desktop to be lower resolution and optimized for Quest. Art production usually starts with high resolution assets and downscales to the target platform, this way we can create high versions and more optimized ones versions easily! I've worked on mobile VR games in the past so optimization is something the team has experience with. Question: How long will base game be? Answer: We're not going to have a long, linear story because of the team size, so we want to focus on replayability and player growth, to ensure people enjoy it for a long time. Question: Can we know what your thoughts are regarding the crafting, harvesting and commercial systems in the game? Answer: Crafting and harvesting are things we want to be fun and immersive (maybe you have to swing a hammer or pick up items). Commercial systems are a little harder, so we want to really study up and get the economics right before we throw people into that Question: What has been the biggest technical challenge so far? Answer: Making sure the world is as immersive and dense as possible on the Quest while keeping framerate a major priority Question: Can you change class later in the game Answer: Not at the start unfortunately, maybe one day! Question: Will full-body tracking be supported with Vive Trackers? Answer: Not at launch, but it's possible at some point in the future Question: How much are you going to punish failure in game? So like, if someone dies in game, will they lose all their equipment and in game currency, or just have their items damaged? Answer: No exact plans, but nothing too harsh. Personally I don't like it when I feel like I'm being "punished" vs "challenged". Question: Will the environment outside the city of Zenith be completely combat focused? I'd like to think that exploring the area would be just as much fun as hitting things on the head with a stick. Would there be places to just chill and appreciate the surroundings outside of the starting area itself? Answer: The world outside of the city of Zenith will not only focused on combat but will offer a variety of activities and areas to explore. Question: Any updates on the melee combat system? Are you still going with "lines" to guide hits like Until You Fall ? Answer: We are still working on melee combat, we are going to try to make it as immersive as possible. For example, we don't want to make it so that you have to match a line to block an attack it should just be based on the angle of the strike versus matching a pattern, but we might still have guidelines that show you the "optimal" block. Question: Will there be houses and/or bases in the game? Answer: Yes, player housing was unlocked as a stretch goal for the Kickstarter, so we'll build that at some point. Question: Will mounts be in the game? Answer: While mounts are not specifically planned, Pets and Familiars are! You will still be able to explore the world of zenith with a furry companion just not on their back! Question: Will you have area servers or global servers? Answer: We really want to have global servers and we're going to work towards that. But the experience comes first! If it starts to lag or feel bad then we'll split it up/shard it when we have to. Question: SAO was mentioned as one of the inspirations for this game. Which parts of this were your inspiration? Was it simply the VRMMO aspect or was it the play style of SAO (ie leveling general skills like cooking and blacksmithing, "front lines" dungeon clearing, and "VR Living" - buying houses, building relationships, having "pets" and the like)? Answer: It's more about the general feel of the game and art style than any specific feature we're putting in. SAO has pretty crappy game design to be honest and would not translate well into a gaming platform -- maybe when we have full dive but we're certainly not there yet Question: Will you have more than one character slot? Answer: Not for the pre-alpha most likely, since we want to focus on the gameplay, but I'd personally like to get that in by launch. Question: Will we be able to fly? Answer: No plans on flying right now. Question: A lot of MMO's have really expansive interactions with their worlds, how do you plan on approaching different climates/regions? And in regards to the size of the world, do you have some real world comparisons that you can make? Answer: About 7 sq km or the size of central park at launch Question: Hand tracking for the quest with the purpose for social aspects only? (I.e: do a thumbs up, scratch your head etc to mimic emotes, while leaving the fast paced aspect to the knuckles) Yes or no. Answer: We don't want people to feel like they can't interact if they don't have finger tracking, but hand tracking sure! We haven't worked out exactly how emotes and stuff work, but definitely want to have some interactions between players like that. Question: Can we get more information on the role switching? Like how it will work, it's limitations and if it will require for us to switch in between gear sets in order to keep the stats compatible and effective, every time we change the role. Answer: This is still very much in the air right now but the thought is that "primary" stats of equipment will change depending on the role you have selected. We're currently thinking that your role depends on which abilities you equip Question: Which VR Setups do you use to Test the Game atm since there are a lot of out now ? Answer: We're using Rift, Quest, Vive, Windows Mixed Reality to test and as we develop we'll be including others as needed. Question: Will there be vr only and pc only classes? If not how do you plan on balancing disparities between both Answer: Yes there will be, we have a lot of work ahead of us in terms of balancing, but they will be very different. Ex. a PC class won't be a VR class trying to use a mouse, it will be completely separate Question: What is the scale you're going for on enemies, are you thinking a few colossal enemies that you're half the size of its foot? Or just slightly taller than the characters height, personally I enjoy fighting massive enemies that break my neck when trying to attack. Answer: We will try to have enemies of all shapes and sizes, at launch but the pre-alpha is probably going to be more humanoid size so we can tweak our melee combat specs Question: How much influence will the players have on the lore of the game? Is it likely that in game player actions will affect the development of the story and world going forward? Answer: For the most part the lore will be for players to uncover instead of create for themselves, but we are considering holding competitions to allows for players to craft lore for certain aspects of the world